Kathleen Collins
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Kathleen Collins 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd i 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM Visionaries: Th inking Th rough Female Filmmakers Series Editors Lucy Bolton and Richard Rushton Titles in the series include: Th e Cinema of Marguerite Duras: Feminine Subjectivity and Sensoriality Michelle Royer Ana Kokkinos: An Oeuvre of Outsiders Kelly McWilliam Kathleen Collins: Th e Black Essai Film Geetha Ramanathan Habiba Djahnine: Memory Bearer Sheila Pett y edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/vision 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd iiii 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM Kathleen Collins The Black Essai Film Geetha Ramanathan 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd iiiiii 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM For Kehan DeSousa Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutt ing-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com We are committ ed to making research available to a wide audience and are pleased to be publishing Platinum Open Access editions of the ebooks in this series. © Geetha Ramanathan, 2020, under a Creative Commons Att ribution-NonCommercial licence Edinburgh University Press Ltd Th e Tun—Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 12/14 Arno and Myriad by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4068 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4070 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4069 1 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4071 4 (epub) Th e right of Geetha Ramanathan to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd iivv 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM Contents List of fi gures vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Th e New York Black Independents 13 2. Th e black essai fi lm 31 3. Ambiguities of auteurship 51 4. Th e magical marvelous modern 83 5. Sacred doubles 100 6. Film across drama and art 117 7. Black feminist culture and black masculinity 132 Aft erword 150 Bibliography 152 Filmography 161 Index 164 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd v 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM Figures 1.1 Ganja and Hess: Inhabiting the landscape 16 2.1 Cruz Brothers: Th e brothers in Miss Malloy’s house 39 2.2 Losing Ground: Playing the role of Frankie 48 2.3 Carmen Jones: “I could have been another Dorothy Dandridge.” Sara in Losing Ground 48 2.4 Carmen Jones: Violence against women 49 3.1 Cruz Brothers: Th e ethnographer 61 3.2 Cruz Brothers: Th e fi gure of fate? 62 3.3 Losing Ground: “Form, color, light” 71 3.4 Losing Ground: “Don’t you take your dick out like it was artistic like it’s some goddamn paintbrush” 73 3.5 Losing Ground: Male artist/auteur 75 4.1 Cruz Brothers: Miss Malloy greets the brothers 92 4.2 Cruz Brothers: Nostalgia or desire? 96 5.1 Losing Ground: Sara and Duke in the metafi lm 111 5.2 Losing Ground: Johnny betrays Frankie 112 6.1 Losing Ground: Th e second screen 119 6.2 Losing Ground: Tableau vivant 124 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd vvii 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in allowing me access to the material of Kathleen Collins. Nina Lorez Collins was extremely generous in allowing me to work with her mother, Kathleen Collins’s, unpublished plays, and other writi ngs. Th ank you. Th e College of Arts and Humanities at West Chester University provided me with a RA CA grant to do the research for this book. Th anks are particularly due to Dr. Hyoejin Yoon who facilitated the process. My gratitude to Professor James Trotman, Founding Director of the Douglass Institute for his expansive vision of African American literature and culture. Warm thanks to Lucy Bolton and Richard Rushton for their careful reading of the typescript. I deeply appreciate the assistance of Joe Watt s of the Digital Media Centre for his work on the clips in this book. Th anks as usual to Dana, Amanda, Neil, and Jenn at FH Green Library. I am grateful to the Edinburgh University Press production team for their diligence, particularly Eliza Wright. On a more personal note, I would like to thank Mona Fayad, who has been extremely supportive. Th anks also to Neus Bonet Farran who accompanied me on yet another research trip, and Anil for hospitality. And lastly, Vek for his enthusiasm for the project, and Dhario for many conversations on black fi lm. 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd vviiii 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd vviiiiii 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM Introduction Th is book makes the case that Kathleen Collins decisively redefi ned the parameters of African American fi lm withTh e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and Losing Ground. Collins’s presentation of black interiority eff ectively inserts fi lm as a “positive scene of instruction” for African Americans, correcting the pejorative values att ached to African American fi lm as the “negative scene of instruction” (Wallace 1993b: 212). As a cultural tool, fi lm consistently appears unassailable for African Americans. Collins comments on the persistence of Hollywood defi nitions of African Americans on the cultural imaginary: Film is the biggest, most powerful and most potent mythology. And we have not refl ected on the possibility of our being able to use this mythology . The Gods and Goddesses of America are fi lm stars. This is the Greek mythology of America and we don’t know where we fi t in this mythology. How can we take a camera in our hands and speak of this sacred myth of fi lm and Hollywood when we would damage this mythology? (Franklin 1980) In decisively inserting black/minority authority in her fi lms, Collins intervenes in this celluloid cult of a quasi-divine white nation where black/minority subjects are invisible or diminished in scale. Her fi lmsTh e Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982) off er a world view sharply at odds with received Hollywood mythologies on African Americans. 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 1 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM 2 Kathleen Collins Conventions of blackface in the cinema of att ractions and early silent fi lm render the presence of black subjects on screen hypothetical, ultimately fantasmatic. Black presence was simulta- neously obviated, and referenced metonymically as the grotesque (Danow 1995). Wallace’s comment about the extremely distraught relationship between blackness and visuality/visibility persists in other visual formats, even the strictly mimetic such as CCTV that capitalize on a dialectic of white invisibility and black visibility to narrativize blackness as “socially undesirable” (Marriot 2007: xiv). White invisibility, black visibility but black absence has persisted since early silent fi lm,Th e Birth of a Nation (dir. Griffi th, 1915) functioning as a model. African American fi lm criticism has established thatTh e Birth of a Nation constructed a cinematic world where black subjects had forfeited the right to exist except as appendages to white superiors, what Manthia Diawara identifi es as “the ban on Blacks participating in bourgeois humanism on Hollywood screens” (1993: 4–5). Further, by inscribing an unthinking racial binary, the fi lm excluded black subjects from national belonging, rendering them the abject of white citizens. Th e Birth of a Nation was not the only repository of such imagery; earlier silent fi lms had purveyed these images, although it is important to note that many fi lms were ambivalent about codings of racial superiority (Stewart 2005: 1–19). Th e fi lm’s sophisticated narrative and aesthetic polish exerted disproportionate infl uence on cinema history, and on the public imaginary. Th e drama is played out in the very title of the fi lm in the presumed contrast between the Klansmen’s defense of the nation as embodied by the virtue of the white “lady” and the villainous black buck who rends the ideals of the “new” nation. Th e white woman is synecdochic of the white nation; defending her establishes the purity and whiteness of the nation. Th e over-sexed black buck with the whites of his teeth gleaming, produced by the stock that accentuated the blackface features of the white actor playing the role, would remain a staple of the national imaginary. Its continued sway over the cultural iconography of African Americans is eloquently parodied in 66204_Ramanathan.indd204_Ramanathan.indd 2 112/10/192/10/19 110:410:41 AAMM Introduction 3 Spike Lee’s 2018 BlacKkKlansman where he shows a chapter of the Klansmen watching the more infamous clips of the movie aft er the investiture of the latest Klansman. Th e fi lm functions as an unholy palimpsest to the moment in the 1970s when the fi lm is set, and to contemporary white nationalist marches. Th e Birth of a Nation established four major archetypes that dominated the screen, and as late as the 1990s, students of African American fi lm classes could identify them in shows in black television networks and mainstream fi lm: for men, the coon and the buck; for women, the Jezebels and the mammies.